Too Many Women

CHAPTER Four

A coolness had sprung up between Wolfe and me. These coolnesses averaged about four a week, say, a couple of hundred a year. This particular one had two separate aspects: first, my natural desire for him to buy a new car opposed to his pigheaded determination to wait another year; and second, his notion of buying a noiseless typewriter opposed to my liking for the one we had.

It happened that at that moment there were other coolnesses swirling around in the old brownstone house, on West Thirty-fifth Street not far from the Hudson River, which he owned and used both for a residence and an office. Four of us lived there, counting him, and we were all temporarily cool. Wolfe had somewhere picked up the idea of putting leaves of sweet basil in clam chowder, and Fritz Brenner, the cook and house manager, strongly disapproved. A guy in New Hampshire who was grateful to Wolfe for something had sent him an extra offering, three plants of a new begonia named Thimbleberry, and Wolfe had given them good bench space up in the cool room, and Theodore Horstmann, the plant nurse, who thought that everything that grew except orchids was a weed, was fit to be tied.

So the atmosphere around the place was somewhat arctic, and on my way down in the elevator the thought struck me that this Naylor-Kerr or Kerr Naylor or Pine-Kerr Naylor business might be used as an excuse to go somewhere out of the cold for a few days. Why couldn’t it be me who got a job in the stock department? Grabbing a taxi from under the chins of two other prospective customers, I considered it. Just any job, one that happened to be loose, didn’t seem practical. A little friendly conversation with the elevator starter had informed me that the line of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., was Engineers’ Equipment and Supplies, and I knew all of nothing about them except maybe overalls. Anyway, the job would have to be one that would let me roam around and rub elbows, or it might take months, and I didn’t want months. It would be hard enough to maneuver Wolfe into letting me try it for a week, since he needed me every hour and might need me any minute, for anything and everything from opening the mail to bouncing unwanted customers or even shooting one, which had been known to happen.

Liking the idea, and being afraid of the dark when it comes to anything resembling murder, I told the taxi driver I had had a vision and asked him to go to the address of the Homicide Squad on West Twentieth Street. There by good luck I found that Purley Stebbins, my favorite sergeant, was on hand, and he obligingly got what I wanted with only three or four growls. A phone call to a brother sergeant downtown brought the information that the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore had occurred around midnight on December 4. The body had been discovered by a man and wife on Thirty-ninth Street a hundred and twenty feet east of Eleventh Avenue. The wife had phoned in while the man stood by, and a radio car had arrived on the scene at one-nineteen A.M. on December 5. It was a DOA, dead on arrival, with Moore’s head crushed and his legs broken. The car that hit him had been found the next morning, parked on West Ninety-fifth Street near Broadway. It was hot, having been stolen the evening of the fourth from where it was parked on West Fifty-fourth Street. Its owner had been checked up and down and backwards and forwards, and was out of it. No witnesses to the accident had been found, but the post-mortem report, plus laboratory examination of various particles clinging to the tires and fender of the stolen car, had satisfied everybody as to what had happened. It was filed as a routine hit-and-run and was still open. After the phone call Purley went through a door, and came back in a couple of minutes and told me that Homicide still had it and was working on it.

“Yeah,” I grinned at him, “I can imagine it-conferences, minute clues subjected to severe scrutiny, ten of your best men turning over stones all the way-” Purley pronounced a word. Having granted my slightest wish, he sneered, “Come and take my desk and do it. Now give. Who’s your client?” I shook my head. “About that noise you use for a voice, I know how you got it.

Your mother had a longing for nutmeg graters when she was carrying you. It might be, say, an insurance company.” “Nuts. No insurance company pays Nero Wolfe prices. Who invited you in?” “Nothing for now.” I got erect. “Somebody had a dream, that’s all. If and when anything for the teeth is brought on, we’ll see that you get a bite. Much obliged, and give my love to your boss.” But I had a chance to do my own love-giving. On my way out there he was, striding in from the entrance, Inspector Cramer himself, concentrated and in a hurry.

He saw me, stopped short, and demanded, “What do you want?” “Well, sir,” I said pleadingly, “I thought with my experience if you had a vacancy anywhere, I’d be willing to start as a patrolman and work my way-” “Natural-born clown,” he said personally. “Is it the Meredith case? Has Wolfe crashed the gate-” “No, sir, Mr. Wolfe would regard that as impertinent. As he was saying only yesterday, if ever Mr. Cramer-” He was on his way. I looked reproachfully at his broad manly back and then headed for the street.